You have to be impressed with the way Nortel keeps up the fight after filing for bankruptcy and shedding once strategic businesses. The staggered company this week threw another punch at Cisco and its other enterprise switching rivals with a new data center aggergator optimized for virtualized environments.
The VSP 9000 will go up against Cisco’s Nexus 7000, Force10’s ExaScale, Extreme’s BlackDiamond 8900, Brocade’s BigIron RX, Juniper’s EX8216, 3Com’s S12500 and any other switch approaching or exceeding 100Gbps per slot capacity and designed to aggregate hundreds of 10Gbps Ethernet ports. Nortel’s challenges are significant, however: the company is restructuring under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from creditors so its future is uncertain; also, the VSP 9000 won’t ship for another year, while most competitor offerings are already on the market.
The VSP 9000 chassis takes up 1/3 of a data center rack and provides 10 I/O slots for three module types: 24-port 10G Ethernet SFP+, 48-port 1G Ethernet SFP and 48-port 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet. Ten gigabit Ethernet density is 240 per chassis, or 720 per rack.
The IPv4 forwarding rate is 970Mpps per VSP 9000 system. It is designed to scale up to a 27Tbps switching architecture in a single chassis or over 100Tbps in a quad switch-cluster architecture, Nortel says.
A key feature of the VSP 9000 is its support for Nortel’s Split Multi-Link Trunking technology, which is a link aggregation technique in which multiple physical links between two switches and another device – such as a server – are treated as a single high-speed pipe. Traffic loads are balanced across all available links.
You can’t fault Nortel for trying to stay in the game while it restructures and speculation swirls around which line of business will be divested next. The VSP 9000 could bring Nortel back into contention after the reorganization — or it could whet the appetite of a potential buyer of some of its enterprise assets.
But you’ve got to give the company credit for throwing another punch, just when many believed it was down for the count.
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